Thursday, December 17, 2009

If you've been following us at all through this summer you know we've done an awful lot of canning. Much of it we will eat ourselves but we also planned on giving a lot of it away as gifts for the holidays.(this is just part of what we canned!)

Home canned jams, relishes & salsas make great gifts but we wanted to make them look as good as they tasted so, Matt came up with these beautiful labels.They were really quite easy to make. The labels were created in Pages (you could use Word as well). First draw a circle that is 2.1" in diameter. Then chose image fill & pick the image of your choice to fill the circles, Matt found the ones we used online. Next create a text box & type information for what is in the jars & center the box in the circles. Matt changed the color of the fonts to match the background. Finally group the circle & text box, then copy & paste it to make multiple copies on a page.The circles were then printed out on full sheet label paper. We got an extra large circle punch from Fiskars which is the perfect size to cut the circles out. Once punched the labels are just the right size to go on top off the jars. (Getting the back off the labels was the hardest part of this whole project.)For some items like First Frost Green Tomato Jam & Port Wine Jelly we wanted to give ideas on how to use them so we created little labels to tie on to the jars. We use the same method of designing the circles & printed them on card stock. We punched a small hole in them & then tied them on with this two colored twine from IKEA.

(I put bunnies on the tag because we always have them in our yard.)

Finally, we packed everything in these pretty paper bags we found at Michael's (13 for $6.99, what a deal!) & then put a Merry Christmas sticker made the same way on the bags.

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I love seeing your creativity. I make all of the gifts I give for the holiday and sometimes wonder if I'm crazy for doing so...but it helps to see I've got other crazies out there with the same notion - that a gift from the heart is the best gift. This year...no jam but some cranberry liquor. Bottling today!

Wow- these are beautiful and what a super idea. I need to do this next year. I have given my friends their presents already. Love that huge circle punch. SInce I am always cutting out circles this would be ideal for me. Oh thanks Kat! Always a good idea here.

The labels are so nice! The whole package is so creative and attractive. As others have mentioned you certainly have some lucky gift receivers. A gift from your kitchen would top my list if I were around there. ;)